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Qasim Amin born on 1st December 1863 Alexandria died April 22 1908 Cairo was an Egyptian jurist and one of the founders of the Egyptian national movement and Cairo University.

Early life

Born to an aristocrat Ottoman Kurdish father from Sulaimaniyah who had served as an governor in Kurdistan and then in Egypt, Qasim's father had been exiled by the ottoman sultan Abdülmecid I from his native Kurdistan, Qasim's father settled in Egypt and became the commander of Khedive Isma'il Pasha's army, Qasim's father held large feudal estates in Alexandria and Kurdistan . Qasim's mother was the daughter of Ahmad Bey Khattab an egyptian member of Muhammad Ali Pasha's family. Qasim is recorded as a hereditary Bey both paternialy and materinaly in the 'Imperial and asiatic quarterly review and oriental and colonial record'.

Education

• University of Montpellier 1881-1885
• Khedivial Law School
• Cairo preparatory school
• Alexandria palace school

Posts

• Chancellor of the Cairo National Court of Appeals
• Secretary general of Cairo University
• Vice President of Cairo University

Qasim was appointed the first secretary general of Cairo University

Charis Waddy an Islamic scholar and writer, and the first woman graduate of Oriental Languages at Oxford University states that Qasim was 'a brilliant young lawyer'.

Works

Qasim was heavly influenced by the works of Darwin, Herbert Spencer and John Stuard Mill. And he was friends with Mohammad Abduh and Sa'd Zaghlul.Amin is perhaps most noted as an early advocate of women's rights in Egyptian society. His 1899 book The Liberation of Women (Tahrir al mara’a) and its 1900 sequel The New Woman (al mara’a al jadida) examined the question of why Egypt had fallen under European power, despite centuries of Egyptian learning and civilisation, and concluded that the explanation was the low social and educational standing of Egyptian women.

Amin pointed out the plight of aristocrat Egyptian women who could be kept as a "prisoner in her own house and worse off than a slave". He made this criticism from a basis of Islamic scholarship and said that women should develop intellectually in order to be competent to bring up the nation's children. This would happen only if they were freed from the seclusion (purdah) which was forced upon them by "the man's decision to imprison his wife" and given the chance to become educated.

Some contemporary feminist scholars, notably Leila Ahmed, have challenged his status as the supposed "father of Egyptian feminism". Ahmed points out that in the gender-segregated society of the time, Amin could have had very little contact with Egyptian women other than immediate family, servants, and possibly prostitutes. His portrait of Egyptian women as backward, ignorant, and lagging behind their European "sisters" was therefore based on very limited evidence.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Qasim Amin", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0